


Phantom Limb / Safe as Houses

by ophelietta



Category: xxxHoLic
Genre: Gen, how do you tag platonic male/female friendship when both are in love with a third?, more H/D friendship, this is the life of a woman with demons, this is the life of the girl dealing with them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-21
Updated: 2012-05-21
Packaged: 2017-11-05 18:05:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/409407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ophelietta/pseuds/ophelietta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>They spent that night in the old book shed as he hunted relentlessly for an answer both of them knew he would never find. He tore books off shelves, she put them back. The sky grew lighter and greyer. His gestures became more mechanical. They moved around each other in that useless ballet, shifting around texts and changing nothing but the paths of dust motes.</i> </p><p>From very far away, Himawari deliberately does not watch as her boys go up in flame. Himawari and Doumeki have a complicated... whatever it is. Set in the early days of Holic Rou.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Phantom Limb / Safe as Houses

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Precipitation](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/8634) by well_ladeedah. 



Doumeki-kun was standing beside her, face ashen and eyes curiously dull. The most tactful on-looker might say that he looked half-dead. His lips were chapped, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard him speak. He had been slated to make a speech, for graduating at the top of their year. Himawari had summoned up a smile and some honeyed tones and lightly gave their homeroom teacher an order that was not quite phrased as an order, and somewhere along the way, the committee in charge of the graduation ceremony dropped the matter of the traditional valedictory address. If she was a little less hollow, she might’ve almost felt triumphant.

 

They stood together in silence. There were cherry blossoms like ragged confetti, speeches about the burning potential of the youth, a scroll that weighed nothing filled with neatly inked characters, including some very specific characters that just happened to be her name. It was important. Or something. Some proof of adulthood. So they said.

 

It was all very picturesque, as things went. In the family seating area, her father was pretending not to tear up while her mother tactfully handed him a handkerchief. Himawari mostly just felt numb. 

 

She didn’t notice when the speeches ended, when the neat rows of students dispersed. She and Doumeki stayed in the same place, not as if they didn’t want to move, but as if they just couldn’t remember how.

 

They weren’t really where they were. But they weren’t with him, either.

 

They were neither here nor there.

 

~

 

There was an argument, a fight, _something_ \- she had so little experience fighting with her parents that she wasn’t sure if she had the name of it right. She “stormed out” - it felt clunky, badly rehearsed - and then stood in the park close to midnight, shivering in a grey sweater and wondering, _What now?_

 

She went to the temple, because… because. Even in her mind she didn’t say, _Because I have no where else to go,_ because she was a girl who took jinxes and curses extremely seriously. It was sort of a necessity, in her line of… living.

 

He let her in silently. His eyes were bloodshot. They spent that night in the old book shed as he hunted relentlessly for an answer both of them knew he would never find. He tore books off shelves, she put them back. The sky grew lighter and greyer. His gestures became more mechanical. They moved around each other in that useless ballet, shifting around texts and changing nothing but the paths of dust motes.

 

Sometimes she would go inside the house and add hot water to the thermos of tea that he had brought out there. The first sip she took blistered her tongue, and the blister had the same comforting texture as the scars on her back. She still ran her fingers over them, absently, the way a guitarist might tunelessly strum his guitar, more for the motion than anything else. There was a kind of knowledge sewed up tight by the threads of that scar tissue that just barely kept her together. The feeling of always being on the edge of suffocating or the edge of screaming was just a side effect. 

 

She let the tea steep too long, and it turned out very bitter.

 

They drank it all.

 

~

 

She woke him up in the morning. She always knew him to be an early riser, before - before everything. When she came back home, her mother was waiting for her, tight-lipped and for once, unsmiling.

 

“Don’t do that again,” Mother said flatly.

 

But her application papers for Fukushima lay on the kitchen table, perfectly serene. And - unlike the day before - they were now signed, stamped, sealed.

 

~

 

When they said goodbye, he didn’t say goodbye. And she got it. In her _bones_ , she got it.  
  
His chin rested on the crown of her head. When she pulled away from that hug, she kept her eyes on his chin, and it was doing this allowed her to walk away.  
  
 

 

~

 

She moved into an old house on campus with four other girls - her parents’ stipulation, along with weekly updates by phone or by e-mail. It was around the fifth time she gently turned down another invite to the movies from friendly Tanaka Noriko and the sixth, or maybe the seventh time, that oldest of the girls, Sato Suzuran shot her an ill-disguised look of disappointment for doing this, that she began have trouble sleeping.  
  
There was no one to tell. So she told no one.

 

~

 

She is in her old neighbourhood. Her grandmother walks out of a burning house, smoke wreathing around her head. She makes no move to put out the fire creeping up her faded yukata, slowly eating her alive. She draws a single kanji in the air, her scorched fingers trailing smoke. It is the kanji for _curse_. 

 

She is in the elementary. There is a knife in her hand. It is shining and wet. Her school teacher twitches at her feet, bleeding, dying. She cannot look away from his tie, which is all askew. He was always very particular about his ties. She saw him eating lunch once, with his tie tucked into his shirt, so it wouldn’t get stained. It is stained now. There is too much blood. He will have to burn it. Like Doumeki’s keiko-gi, a very long time ago.  

 

She is on a busy street. Noriko is walking away. Himawari reaches out to touch her, trying to call her back. Himawari touches her shoulder. Noriko turns around, and smiles. Her teeth are bloody. Her limbs are mangled, melding with twisted metal, and thick, noxious snakes writhes behind her. In the distance, she can hear an ambulance, the insane choir of car horns. An unearthly sound.

 

She is inside of an egg. Its walls are smooth as milk, grey like a pearl. It is very cold, and she feels an intense relief. There is a perfect silence. No one is screaming, no one is crying, the sirens are dead. Everyone is safe. Everyone is safe. The egg’s walls press in closer, crushing her. She feels completely calm.

 

She is eight. Her mother strokes her back gently, the way she did the night after the neighbour’s fire. Her whisper is soothing, her words indistinct. Himawari listens closer. _You are a monster_ , her mother is murmuring, over and over, like a chant, a lullaby. _You are a monster. You are a monster_.

 

She is in a bathtub. The water is warm and dark. It smells of copper and roses. Her soul is leaking out of her, like air from a balloon. She watches the white smoke of her life trail up into the sky like ghosts. Far away, she can hear him laughing, and his laughter is so utterly _free_.

 

She is falling. She shatters the glass beautifully. The ground reaches up to embrace her. _Yes. This is the way it was_ supposed _to be_.

 

She is strapped to a target. Doumeki’s eyes meet hers. They are pure gold and hollowed of all impurities. The flight of his arrow is true. She has no heart for the arrowhead to pierce. Instead, a great darkness explodes and swallows the world whole.

 

She is standing over him, and he is a slight figure wrapped in bandages, veiled by drapes. This time, he does not smile and turn his head to her, sleepy-sweet. Clouds of dark butterflies fill the room with their rustling, their subtle perfume. They flutter over his closed eyes, they fill his ears and nose, they block up his throat, they settle over his struggling form like a living blanket made of violet-edged wings and dark shining bodies. She struggles to reach him, but the bed drifts out of reach, and when she opens her mouth to scream, it becomes filled with butterflies.

 

She is in the shop. Doumeki is in his bloodstained keiko-gi, his hands lying palm up on his folded knees, as if emptied of an offering. His eyes are glazed over with defeat.

 

She sees him fall through the window, over and over. She sees him fall, and she does nothing.

 

~

 

She stopped sleeping.

 

~

 

The funny and useful thing was that nobody noticed. In a school where half the student population was wired from caffeine or continually staggering on the edge of sleeplessness, she didn’t stand out. It wasn’t like she really talked to anyone, anyway, besides Tanpopo.

 

He tried to coo her a melody, but it was thin and strained. From his perch, he watched unhappily as she went through the motions of a slow self-destruction.

 

Somewhere, someone was keeping a boy trapped in a house alive. And she was two hours away in Fukushima, barely remembering to feed her pet bird.

 

~

 

She was on the steps of the lecture hall when she blacked out. It was like winking, blinking, like teleportation, or the way Watanuki-kun sometimes talked about crossing through dreams - one moment she was there in the hall, and then the next moment, she was somewhere else, a hospital bed.

 

When she came to, there was, of all improbable things, a pink balloon tied to her bedside with a bit of curling silver ribbon. There was a note attached to it, written in lavender ink.

 

_Dear Kunogi-san,_

_I received word that you might find this useful. Just place it by your bed when you fall asleep tonight, and I am sure you will feel the effects by morning._

_All the best,_

_Kohane_

_P.S. You might call Shizuka-niisan sometime. I think he needs someone to talk to._

  
But he was Doumeki. _Doumeki_ . The world on his shoulders. She couldn't add the wreckage of herself to that, she couldn't, she wouldn't, she refused to, she...  
  
_I think he needs someone to talk to._

She fell into a drugged sleep, the pink balloon bobbing gently by her pillow.

 

_~_

She is eating cake. It is so light that it melts, vanishes, as if it had never been. There are crumbs all down her uniform, spilling onto her dark skirt, and she strains her tongue upwards, trying to catch the last bit of buttercream icing that has somehow found its way onto the end of her nose.

 

The cake is beautiful. The strawberries on top are cut into heart-shaped slices, spread out into a graceful fan. Strawberry juice dyes the icing a pale, dreamy rose. Strawberry chiffon cake. The three of them. Eating it together, in the park. Her tears break the sunlight into prisms of rainbowed light.

 

~

 

When she woke up, she asked for a phone.

 

“Doumeki-kun,” she sighed, before she even remembered to say _Hello_.

 

“Kunogi,” he said. His voice was cracked, and deeply exhausted, but there was also a hint of something she hadn’t heard in… forever, something she had learned to stop listening for. The thinnest curl of cautious joy.

 

“Doumeki-kun.” All of a sudden, there were too many, too many words, flooding the distance between them, taking it over with the relentlessness of a heartbeat. “You. I _missed_ you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Although this was inspired by well_ladeedah's "Precipitation", it strikes me as _extremely fair_ to say that both versions of "Phantom Limb" - and my entire headcanon thereafter - was extremely influenced by evil_whimsey's ["Sea Deep, 'Til Doomsday Morning"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/139022).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [I Wake to Sleep (The Waking Slow Remix of Phantom Limb)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/409414) by [ophelietta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ophelietta/pseuds/ophelietta)




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